SCIENCE OF SPIRIT
Table of Contents
Articles by Dr. James P. Pottenger

Article 1 (Read) HP/SOS WORD MEANINGS (Holographic Psychology/Science of Spirit) The philosophies of the nature of BEING. The study of the nature of reality as it relates to the science of the essence of things. One’s ontology is one’s personal identity as described by self-image psychology. One’s personal self-esteem or self-worth is one’s basis of one’s reality. Read this Article Article 2 (Read) FIXED SUBJECT/OBJECT CONCEPTUAL DEFINITIONS AND THE PROCESS LANGUAGE MODEL OF CHANGE This article is about a new human being that has been discovered by synthesizing the three sciences of the physical, mental and spiritual nature of our universe. Read this Article Article 3 (Read) THE POWER TO CONCEIVE QUESTION: Why would a Science of Mind student also require a Science of Spirit education? ANSWER: Science of mind as introduced by Drs. Ernest and Fenwicke Holmes entails multiple levels of understanding. These levels have received extensive research since their passing. With the evolution of the science of psychology we now have evidence of three different cosmologies that humans awaken to which gives us examples (evidence) of three different philosophical cosmologies these psychological schools use to base their research on when testing their theories and/or hypotheses. Very few psychologists are aware that their psychological system is based on a philosophical cosmology. Read this Article Article 4 (Read) HISTORY OF HEAVEN AND HELL Ancient religions like Zoroastrianism of Persia created a heaven and a hell in their Scriptures (Gathas) based on geographic “places” where a human goes to after s/he dies. The date of Zoroaster’s birth is uncertain, however, scholars suggest it was sometime between 1000 BC and 600 BC. These “places” became “realities by definition” within a culture using revelations by Zoroaster (and by other prophets in other religions) to determine in their “holy” Scriptures the “truth” to believe and follow. This gave both the secular and the sacred leaders of a culture control in determining their rules and regulations over their populations for countless centuries. Read this Article Article 5 (Read) ERNEST HOLMES AND REINCARNATION The teachings of Ernest Holmes exploded on the American scene exposing a spiritual synthesis that rocked the world. He took the archetype patterns of Plato as the source of all creation. He took the teleology of Aristotle’s monism as the involution patterns of intelligence and design that produce the evolution of creation. He took the unconscious mind of Freud and declared it to be the two aspects of God, the transcendent spiritual source of unlimited potential as the unconscious and the immanent psychological source that expresses as the conscious individualized human being. He took the individual conscious awareness of Jung’s discovery of a self and linked the self as both the responsible and the empowered “person” capable of discovering “his” or “her” “Nature” as the formerly worshipped God of dualism, all power (omnipotent), all knowledge (omniscient), all presence (everywhere present). Read this Article Article 6 (Read) THE HUMAN ADVENTURE IS JUST BEGINNING Many have asked me about the “source” of these lessons. The sources discussed in every lesson are the result of inner guidance, research, contemplation and include aspects of first, second, and third reality. Philosophy (“spirit”, “mind”, “matter”) and psychology (the behavior of the individual’s orientation resulting from their belief of these concepts) are the ingredients for the “holistic model” in these lessons. These lessons deal with the philosophical concepts of an individual’s world view and/or belief-systems (Weltanschauung) and the psychological behaviors they produce. As the individual’s awareness changes, a different world view awakens. With this awareness, a totally new life-style emerges. Read this Article Article 7 (Read) WHEN AND WHY CAUSE AND EFFECT CHANGES TO ACCEPTANCE-BY-DEGREE It is this phenomena of a human being that is capable of challenging his or her conditioning that HP/SOS discovered led to the second reality human being. It is this second reality human that produced the humanistic psychology school. HP/SOS believes it is a paradigm shift that acts as a cosmological change in one’s reality. A self, person, ego or I is “born” that is capable, for the first time in his or her life, to realize that how s/he understands his or her reality is not “out-there” (or someone else’s definition) but is actually a belief system within his or her own brain. HP/SOS names this awesome paradigm shift, “Location of Comprehension” (LOC). Read this Article Article 8 (Read) WHY GOD CANNOT KNOW EVIL OR DUALISM We speak of people, places and things in the plural as if there exists more than one object that is being referred to regarding our subject of discussion. This other is believed to exist in a space-time reality that is other than me. This language use seems harmless enough on first glance, and in fact it would seem irrational to speak otherwise when we’re referring to more than one person, place or thing. This dualistic form of speaking and thinking however, is not harmless. Speaking and thinking, when understood with a second reality reflection capability or location of comprehension (LOC), reveals that one’s comprehension can never be plural. Read this Article Article 9 (Read) HISTORY BACKGROUND OF RELIGIONS Christianity emerged in ancient Palestine in the shadow of the Roman Empire, which was at its zenith. The Romans had conquered Palestine in 63 BC, and by the time of the birth of Jesus, their empire had imposed a political unity on the lands bordering the Mediterranean greatly facilitating the spread of various religions. Religiously, the Roman Empire was pluralistic. Greek and Roman religions were tolerated from the earliest times, and in the first century BC emperor worship was encouraged as a means of chiefly promoting loyalty to the empire. Mystery cults, largely of Middle Eastern origin, were also popular and widespread. Because the temper of the age was syncretistic, the mystery religions borrowed extensively from one another, and over time they came to share a number of common attributes. Most importantly, almost every cult centered around a "savior god" who had died and been resurrected. Adherents attained immortality by sharing “symbolically” in the death and resurrection of their savior god, whether he was called Mithras or Osiris, Adonis or Attis, Orpheus or Dionysus. Read first secttion of this Article  Read the entire PDF Version Article 10 (Read) EXPLAINING CARL JUNG’S DISCOVERY What enables a person to ask and/or answer questions? How can a question be asked about data when a person has no knowledge of the data? These two questions are not asked when a human assumes that it is natural to ask questions and it is also natural to understand the answers given to those questions via a person’s environment. To further complicate such questioning along with answering, we now must add the differences between left hemisphere “intellectual knowing” and right hemisphere “experiential knowing”. What we now recognize is the significant part our brain plays in what we know and how we know what we know.  Read first secttion of this Article  Read the entire PDF Version Article 11 (Read) THE WESTERN SEARCH FOR GOD IS THE EASTERN SEARCH FOR SELF As human beings are born their journey of life begins. Briefly, they are first a child, become an adolescent, an adult, a senior, and then they die. During this process each individual fills an imaginary book with facts about his/her life. Most people are to varying degrees, well or sick, happy or sad, rich or poor, wise or ignorant, thin or heavy, and are expressing love, disagreement or hate throughout their lives. For countless centuries millions of human beings have experienced these aspects and many have tried to answer a major question during their lives: WHO AM I? Read first secttion of this Article  Read the entire PDF Version Article 12 (Read) PLATO’S THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE As a human begins to question his/her reality, s/he will already have certain basic beliefs about the world, God, the environment and the people in his/her world, including him/her self. When we are very young, our WHY and WHAT questions are generally answered by our immediate family. As we grow in years we question more authorities about sacred and secular matters. Our schooling is conducted by such authorities, usually without our being aware that we are forming a belief-system that will be the determining factor of our reality. As our reality increases in its complexity and scope we find our world necessarily corresponds to our reality. There is no way, at first, to distinguish between our reality and the world of person, place or thing our reality is describing. Why would we question what we have accepted as the truth when we are not yet aware that our reality of meaning and feeling is being formed by other people’s opinions?  Read this Article Article 13 (Read) HOW HUMANS LEARN There are questions humans are unable to ask at certain stages during their personal evolution or growth. For example, no one has ever had a baby starting to talk at birth. There are questions humans must ask in order to understand differing world views about reality that require both certain questions to be asked as well as the ability to comprehend answers to those questions. For example, how can someone ask a question about an aspect of reality that s/he has no comprehension of the existence of that aspect of reality in his or her current reality. To further clarify how human’s learn, how can or could a human correspond with another human prior to some common form of a language that symbolized the data desired to be communicated? For example, every culture must have a language to describe a culture. Try describing anything without a, verbal, written or body language. Read this Article Article 14 (Read) THE DISCOVERY OF THE SELF Humans begin life with a subject/object language model that names the objects of one’s world as person, place or thing (he, she or it). This language model has been used in many languages (English, French, German, etc.). In the United States, the English language has been used with all of us learning to give names to the objects and people in our world. We also were taught to judge whether something or someone is good or bad, big or little, rich or poor, etc. (The pair of opposites.) This language model of person, place or thing became our first reality or the language we use to describe our world as well as ourselves. With this language model humans have developed an awesome technology that is at a point of blessing or destroying us. We are at a point in history when humans seem ready to develop a new language model that fits a universal cosmology. HP/SOS (Holographic Psychology/Science of Spirit), developed by our research team, has been given the job to expose a universal cosmology that is both immanent and transcendent as well as a process language model to assist in our understanding of an evolutionary nature of human beings. Read this Article Article 15 (Read) SELF IMAGE PSYCHOLOGY First reality humans believe that it is their body’s brain that is responding to input and not that there is actually a conscious awareness (person, self, I or ego) that in second reality is capable of separating one’s self from one’s beliefs and the behavior those beliefs are producing. First reality is unaware that one responds to one’s own philosophical/psychological dynamics,rather than to someone or something “out there”. There is no personal responsibility for what is causing one’s responses when believing in first reality that it is someone or something that is outside and separate that is causing one’s reactions. We name this first reality behavior the “blame game of scapegoating”. Read this Article Article 16 (Read) THE MYSTERY OF BEING RIGHT OR WRONG How can being right or wrong be a mystery? Millions of people every day in every culture use these words: “She’s right”, “He’s wrong”, “That’s right” or “It’s wrong”. HP/SOS is capable of explaining options to such a form of thinking that interprets these words with the help of the three different levels of understanding. First reality’s body with a conditioned brain is primarily the level of understanding that has always used these words, because the brain is conditioned to believe something is true or factual. In that level an abundance of energy goes into defending that fact or truth. Read this Article Article 17 (Read) THE MYSTERY OF PERCEPTION Human beings for countless centuries have had no reason to question how they perceived their world. The what they were “seeing” or perceiving was adequately told to them by their mentors. Below is a graphic explaining how simple a human’s perception is believed to be in a human’s first reality. HP/SOS is explaining in its research why a human’s first reality makes the mistake of believing that perception is a result of one’s eyes “seeing” or “perceiving” the outside world as it is. This is an assumption that the image perceived is the same as the film of a camera that gives us a perfect replica of the world the camera is photographing. Read this Article Article 18 (Read) THE MYSTERY IS SOLVED WHEN OUTER CAUSE CHANGES TO INNER ACCEPTANCE The researchers of HP/SOS (Holographic Psychology/Science of Spirit) are often asked to explain the above terms in simple words or in a brief sentence or paragraph. We could say that the research is about human nature and its relationship to the divine. We could say it is about human knowledge and its limitations. We could say it is about human understanding and the realities humans believe as a result of that understanding. We could say it explains how and why involution produces evolution. These general statements are all true about the research but they tell us little or nothing about the actual principles being discovered. The major problem with trying to explain anything that is complex in simple words is it just can’t be done. Read this Article Article 19 (Read) CAN THE MYSTERY OF GOD BE RESOLVED? We begin to answer this exciting question by a quotation from Karen Armstrong’s book A History of God. She states the following on the cover of her book: “As soon as they became recognizably human, men and women, in their hunger to understand their own presence on earth and the mysteries within and around them-humans began to worship gods.” Weaving a multicolored fabric of historical, philosophical, intellectual and social developments and insights, Armstrong shows how, at various times through the centuries, each of the monotheistic religions has a subtly different concept of God. Read this Article Article 20 (Read) THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN EARLY AND ADVANCED SECOND REALITY There is little reason for a human being to understand the complex dynamics of how or why s/he comprehends his/her current reality, physiologically or psychologically. His/her culture will begin establishing his/her current reality prior to his/her birth. We are now aware that the conditioning of one’s brain begins prior to one’s birth after the formation of the brain in the mother’s fetus. Each culture uses a language from which one’s reality is learned. Most modern courses in philosophy (at universities) will have a section on language and its relationship to the realities that language symbolizes, however, very few humans on planet Earth will ever take such training. Therefore, we have billions of people being born on planet Earth where an individual’s culture does the job of teaching these individuals the nature of the reality s/he will live his/her entire life. Read this Article Article 21 (Read) DISPUTE BETWEEN REASON (SCIENCE) AND FAITH (RELIGION) IS SOLVED Three general types of myths (Creation, Deity and Hero) have been central to human societies and continue to influence the way humans think, speak and act about the past, present or future. 1. Creation myths attempt to tell us where humans came from and how everything began. They seem to have been the first stage in what became the psychic life of the human species. Creation myths became linked to the concept of “Deity” in which something or someone of a supernatural nature “created” the universe. 2. Deity myths became the basis for most religions of the world, in which gods and goddesses were supernatural and on occasion interrelated with human beings. 3. Hero myths became the stories or metaphors describing human progress with authoritative figures reporting and writing a history that enforced the stories, often as “sacred” scripture. These authoritative “stories” became “blueprints” (archetypes) for humans to worship as gods and goddesses. They continue to be told today as “sacred” scripture (fact or truth) by many authority figures, both secular and sacred.  Even though many people in today’s world think of the word “myth” as a belief that is untrue or superstition, most of the populations of the world still believe in their cultural myths as being true and factual. Ancient myths become modern metaphors as most humans continue to believe that their five senses are relating directly to an external world with an empirical observation.  Read this Article Article 22 (Read in HTML) (Read in PDF) HOW TO WE KNOW WHAT WE KNOW Craig Eisendrath has written a book titled AT WAR WITH TIME, The Wisdom of Western Thought from The Sages to a New Activism for Our Time. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and has taught at M.I.T. and other institutions. His book is helping people understand what HP/SOS has named “first reality”. On the first page of his Preface he states: “In response to crisis, thoughtful people search inside themselves for confidence or security. For many, traditional beliefs, which provided comfort for earlier generations, no longer work. These beliefs include a faith in God, in the soul, and in eternal ideas; a belief that science can deliver sure answers; and confidence that history will inevitably have a favorable outcome. Together, these beliefs form what I call “permanence complex”. With these beliefs in question, many people are beset with the uncertainty which marks our age.” The first part of his book explains what he means by “permanence complex” which is basically that for the past 5,000 years humans have been conditioned to believe what they were told by their authorities and they continued to do so up to about 150 years ago. “Accordingly, in part II, we will review as succinctly and as accurately as we can developments in the last 150 years, and particularly in the last seventy-five, across major scientific disciplines, and in history and human experience, which can be seen as converging on a new way of thinking. Particularly in the physical and biological sciences, we will rely heavily on a relatively handful of representative scientists who have seen, in the advances in their fields, implications for a new view of the world. In some cases their work is controversial, and its final worth is not settled. Many other scientists could have been chosen. The work represented here illustrates not only the excitement of modern science but the fact that its basic findings are still in flux, and that any conclusions we reach must, accordingly, be tentative.” Thank you Dr. Eisendrath for daring to challenge human history. Read this Article in HTML (Read in PDF) Article 23 (Read in HTML) (Read in PDF) HOW THE BRAIN PROCESSES REALITIES As I write these words and you read them, it is natural to assume that what I am saying with these words is the same meaning and feeling that you are giving to them. How else could we communicate if we did not have the same or at least similar meaning and feeling for the words we use? The answer to this simple question is one of the major discoveries of the HP/SOS research. The answer is complex because it requires a number of areas of information that are relatively new. We now are aware that: Words are symbols that humans use to represent the reality being related to by an individual. The English language uses words that relate to a person, place or thing (she, he or it) that are named in a subject/object language model. Subject/object language models use nouns and verbs to name objects and actions connected to those objects. English also uses adjectives to add descriptions of the objects. Read this Article in HTML  (Read in PDF) Top of Page